Advertisers who book campaigns on mobile advertising networks use the same channel (category) classifications to run their advertisements as those used in desktop environments. In particular, advertising networks typically try to classify their supply (publisher inventory) into channels (categories or genres) according to their web properties to make it easy for advertisers to reserve inventory. While this approach works for matching booked demand to incoming supply in desktop browser environments, it is ineffective in mobile environments, as well as any other environment that differs from the desktop browser environment. This is primarily due to the differences in user behavior when browsing content in the mobile environment, as opposed to the desktop browser environment.
One example difference is the fast context switching that is common in the mobile environment. In the mobile environment, the user often moves from one “channel context” to another in a matter of seconds. Indeed, the user often switches contexts without even realizing that such a switch has been made. For example, the user can open an entertainment application, quickly switch to a finance application, and subsequently jump to a productivity application. The user can then continue switch to other, unrelated applications, such as a gaming application, a social network application, a utility application, etc. Here, the user moves through the different contexts within a few minutes or less. This fast context switching behavior makes the current channel-based taxonomy used for advertising in the desktop browser environment unsuitable for the mobile environment. For example, the channel-based taxonomy is suited for desktop browser environments where users slowly browse through different, but related, channels of content. Moreover, the channel-based taxonomy is generally ineffective in the mobile environment, as users in mobile environments rarely remain at a particular context long enough to build relevance and connections in that context.